Tale of Two Wastelands, a mod that combines the world maps of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, won’t be getting ported to (or otherwise remade for) those long-rumored remasters and remakes. One of the best ways to experience the wasteland will remain anchored to the older games..
The existence of upcoming new versions of Bethesda’s Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas might be the worst-kept secret in gaming right now, much like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered was prior to its release last year. If this is the first you’re hearing of this, here’s Kotaku’s breakdown of why everyone is so convinced that the remasters are on the way.
The community is understandably excited, with said excitement at least partially fueled by the success of Fallout season 2 on Prime. But a remastered version of either game comes with the same potential headache as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered did: a lack of support for close to two decades of mods.
Where Oblivion Remastered is concerned, Bethesda outright confirmed at release that “mods are not officially supported” for the game. This didn’t stop the modding community from finding workarounds for certain classic Oblivion mods, but the end result is clear: the original 2006 release of the game has ten times the number of mods on popular mod distribution site Nexus Mods that Oblivion Remastered has.
As spotted by Game*Spark, at least one huge total conversion mod for both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas won’t be making the jump to the current generation, as confirmed by the team behind Tale of Two Wastelands in their Discord server. Why? Because, understandably, producing a version of TTW that works with both remasters “would be a mammoth effort and would require an entire rebuild of the project.”
Tale of Two Wastelands feels like its own game
If you haven’t played Tale of Two Wastelands for yourself, let me be the first to tell you that you really should. Merely describing it as a way to play through both games with a single character is massively underselling it, because it doesn’t just smoosh the Mojave and the Capital Wasteland together.
Tale of Two Wastelands overhauls both games in a way that makes the experience truly cohesive by completely rebalancing the game, altering the level cap and perks, and even restoring a bunch of cut content. It’s such a huge undertaking that it even has its own separate tag on Nexus, with over 1,200 support mods of its own. The TTW team aren’t exaggerating when they describe the project as its own “unique game.”
Ever since I first tried TTW back in 2019, I haven’t returned to the standalone versions of either Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 3. It obviously sucks to hear that the project won’t be supported once the Fallout remasters drop, even if it’s completely understandable. We can only hope that Bethesda makes a better effort to support legacy mods this time around, but, in the case of Tale of Two Wastelands, we may have to make peace with the fact that some Fallout modding projects are simply too grand in scope to get ported to their remastered counterparts.
